Friday, May 6, 2011

History, since the agricultural revolution, can be usefully conceptualized as an offensive-defensive arms race between technologies of abundance and social structures of expropriation.

Until the appearance of agriculture, human society didn’t produce a large enough surplus to support much in the way of social organization above the hunter-gatherer group. Agriculture was the first technology of abundance sufficiently productive to support parasitic classes on a large scale. With agriculture came a superstructure of kings, priests, martial castes and landlords who milked the producing classes like cattle.

We now seem to be nearing the end of an interval of ten thousand years or so between two thresholds. The first threshold was the appearance of the first large-scale technology of abundance — agriculture.

Since then we have been in that aforementioned arms race. Sometimes technologies of abundance produce an increase in the social surplus faster than the class superstructure can expropriate it, and things become better for the ordinary person — as in the late Middle Ages, when the horse collar and crop rotation caused a massive increase in agricultural productivity, the craftsmen of the free towns developed new production technologies, and the decay of feudalism resulted in falling rents and de facto emancipation of large sectors of the peasantry. Sometimes the advantage shifts to the social structures of expropriation, and things get worse — as in the case of the absolute monarchies’ suppression of the free towns, what Immanuel Wallerstein called the “long sixteenth century,” and the Enclosures.

We’re approaching the second threshold, when the technologies of abundance reach a takeoff point beyond which the social structures of expropriation can no longer keep up with the rising production curve.

The interval between the two thresholds has been comparatively brief, compared to the hundreds of thousands of years that homo sapiens has existed in something like its present form and the billion years or so that the sun will likely be able to support human life. Seen in that light, this interval is a brief initial adjustment period in the early stages of human productivity. The state was an anomaly in this early stage of the technological explosion, in the childhood of the human race, by whose means the parasitic classes were briefly able to piggyback on the revolution in productivity and harness it as a source of income for themselves.

During this brief interval, parasitic classes — bureaucrats, usurers, landlords, and assorted rentiers — used the state to create scarcity by artificial means, in order to enclose the increased productivity from technologies of abundance as a source of rents for themselves. But after these first few millennia, the productivity curve has shifted so sharply upward that the increases in output will dwarf the rentier classes’ ability to expropriate it. What’s more, new technologies of abundance are rendering artificial scarcities unenforceable.

Around forty years ago, it was fashionable to say that humanity was entering the “Age of Aquarius.” There is a sense in which the 1970s really were the beginning of a new age of human liberation. They saw the birth of the two technologies of abundance — the desktop computer and cheap numerically-controlled machine tools — which will eventually free us from the grip of the corporate state and its artificial scarcities.

The apparent reaction of the decades since — neoliberalism and the Washington Consensus, Reaganism and Thatcherism, the jackbooted police state of the Drug War and War on Terror, the neocons’ wet dream of a Thousand Year Reich enforced by the Sole Remaining Superpower, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act — can be seen as a desperate rear guard action by the corporate state, the death throes of a dying system, a last-ditch effort by the forces of artificial scarcity to suppress the forces that will destroy them.

This effort will fail. What file-sharing has done to the record industry, and what Wikileaks has done to the national security state, are only the dimmest foreshadowings of what technologies of abundance and freedom will do to the old authoritarian institutions.

Encryption and darknets are destroying the power of the music, publishing, and movie industries to collect rents on their so-called “intellectual property,” and eliminating economic transactions as a tax base to support bureaucrats.

New physical production technologies, by extracting greater outputs from ever smaller inputs, are rendering the privileged classes’ huge supplies of land and capital utterly useless as a source of income.

Ordinary people, with cheap means of informational and physical production, will soon be able to meet our needs through peaceful production and trade in a fraction of the present workweek, and dump the rentiers off our backs.

If this framing of human history is valid, we’re just finishing the dawn of humanity’s brief childhood, and entering the long afternoon of its maturity.

By Silvia Federici and George Caffentzis

Dear comrades,

We are writing to express to you our solidarity at a time when the pain for those who have died or have disappeared is still raw, and the task of reshaping of life out of the immense wreckage caused by the earthquake, the tsunami and the nuclear reactor meltdowns must appear unimaginable. We also write to think together with you what this moment marked by the most horrific nuclear disaster yet in history signifies for our future, for the politics of anti-capitalist social movements, as well as the fundamentals of everyday reproduction.

Concerning our future and the politics of anti-capitalist movements, one thing is sure. The present situation in Japan is potentially more damaging to people’s confidence in capitalism than any disaster in the “under-developed” world and certainly far more damaging than the previous exemplar of nuclear catastrophe, Chernobyl. For none of the exonerating excuses or explanations commonly flagged in front of man-made disasters can apply in this case. Famines in Africa can be blamed, however wrongly, on the lack of capital and technological “know how,” i.e., they can be blamed on the lack of development, while the Chernobyl accident can be attributed to the technocratic megalomania bred in centrally-planned socialist societies. But neither underdevelopment nor socialism can be used to explain a disaster in 21st century Japan that has the world’s third largest capitalist economy and the most technologically sophisticated infrastructure on the planet. The consequences of the earthquake, the tsunami and, most fatefully, the damaged nuclear reactors can hardly be blamed on the lack of capitalist development. On the contrary, they are the clearest evidence that high tech capitalism does not protect us against catastrophes, and it only intensifies their threat to human life while blocking any escape route. This is why the events in Japan are potentially so threatening and so de-legitimizing for the international capitalist power-structure. For the chain of meltdowns feared or actually occurring stands as a concrete embodiment of what capitalism has in store for us —an embodiment of the dangers to which we are being exposed with total disregard of our well-being, and what we can expect in our future, as from China to the US and beyond, country after country is planning to multiply its nuclear plants.

Thursday, April 28, 2011

After pepper spraying a family in Portland, a police officer said, "That’s why you shouldn't bring kids to protests." Blaming the victim is the standard defense for political violence. Kids and parents should be safe at legal rallies because protests shouldn't be cordoned off, ordered to disperse without time or a place to go, and attacked.

At least one woman had a miscarriage after the WTO demonstrations in Seattle in 1999. I told somebody about this and they got angry saying, “Anybody who goes into a situation like that while they're pregnant is irresponsible!” But she was a local resident who's neighborhood was invaded by police using tear gas. Who was responsible for that?

Pondering these events, and helping raise twin radical toddlers, I contacted the family that got pepper sprayed in Portland and offered to bring our kids if they ever held a protest against the way they were treated. It felt good to talk about my anger and the fear of kids being hurt at political events.

Friday, April 22, 2011

Anarchism swept us away completely, because it demanded everything of us and promised everything to us. There was no remote corner of life that it did not illumine ... or so it seemed to us ... shot though with contradictions, fragmented into varieties and sub-varieties, anarchism demanded, before anything else, harmony between deeds and words- Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary

Friday, April 15, 2011

"Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will."— Frederick Douglass

It might seem dull at parts but watch the whole video. To me it seems to tie the drug war, the economic banking crisis, and mexican cocaine all into one knot at the feet of the murderous old fucks who run American banks.-Icaro Psychedelic Collective

What does drug money laundering look like in the 21st century? Can you believe Wachovia, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Bank of America, CitiBank, the Federal Reserve, and the biggest banks in the world, were intimately involved with Mexican drug cartels? And that the cash liquidity of the underground cocaine market is the only thing keeping the global financial sector running? Watch the video, read the story that broke in the Guardian, and make your own conclusions. Watch the sound byte pulled at the 7:00 minute mark. According to the UN investigators, in times when other bubbles burst, the only thing keeping banks afloat is the unceasing global demand for cocaine. What a trip!-dosenation

Monday, April 11, 2011

US officials have acknowledged the existence of secret military-run prisons across Afghanistan where suspected terrorists are held and interrogated without charges, for weeks or months on end.

The US military previously denied operating secret prison systems in Afghanistan, although a number of human rights groups insisted they were.

The previously administration, under former US President George W. Bush ran a network of secret CIA detention sites, a program US President Barack Obama was highly critical off. The discovery of a new network under Obama will likely anger many.

Little is known about the methods which are being employed in interrogations today, but if they resemble Bush-era tactics, torture is likely being used. -read more at rt.

Friday, April 1, 2011

thoughts flybywhen I'm feeling like deaththere is no desire leftbut cold lonesomeshattering content illusionsdoused headphonespierced corneasecstatic sickness prickling my fevered bodyand swimming up my spinethere is nothing to dobut lay downnowhere but backworried that rental thugsrealizing I'm on drugs and kicking me outon the streetI feel deadbeat down by some mechanical drumstickand I have no idea where I am

Scary when he makes sense isn't it? I believe that's what scares people the most about Charles Manson. If they look﻿ too close they may see themselves mirrored back. Most people run all their lives away from themselves because they fear themselves more than Mr. Manson... and perhaps they should. It's easy to cage an animal while forgetting we are also animals.

Monday, March 28, 2011

Thanks to the automobile culture, for example, in the 20th century, an area equal to all the arable land in Ohio, Indiana, and Pennsylvania was paved in the US This means highways, off-ramps, parking lots, etc.--each replacing countless eco-systems.

While the developed world quenches its insatiable thirst for the newest and latest gizmo, much of the subsequent e-waste is exported to countries like India, China, Pakistan, Nigeria, and Ghana. "The pollution and related health problems in countries where e-waste is dumped will increase massively as the amount of electronics used worldwide is growing exponentially and the number of countries used as dump sites will grow,-read more at infoshop.org

Saturday, March 26, 2011

I am fixed, lightlike a lampdulled in the shadeaged by the sunI am hookedbarbed lip piercing tied to monofilamentor was it gut string?or a song?am I a broken blade?tricked into cutting stone?maybe metal smelted in the glowilluminateswords passingbetween moving bicycleswhispers lost in the streama grain of sand on your feet

its different herebecause the air has changedmy lungs are filledyet I'm so thirstydying to breathesmelling like a paper millinsidea dumpsterand I'm still aninfant, young sapling manlimbs branching out to the sky'sfarthest reaches you're stilla broken shellon this polluted beachat the end of my streetthe salt air is a tiderising intomy chest when I'm homekneeling downto touch the oceanas she pulls away

I call on all the peoples to support us, the Egyptians, Tunisians, French, even Chinese, all the peoples of the world, we welcome their support and sympathy.

In a few hours, the UN Security Council will decide to start air strikes against Libya. France has said that it is ready to start the bombardment from tonight.

We condemn this international resolution, if it is realized. And we totally reject any foreign intervention in Libya, whatever shape it may take, especially a French one. France, that sold Qaddafi weapons worth billions, weapons that he is using today to blow up Libyans, the same France that didn't stop such deals until 3 weeks back.

We condemn this intervention that will transform Libya into a real hell, even more than now. That intervention will also steal the revolution from the Libyans, a revolution that has cost them thousands of dead women and men so far.

To be liberated from Qaddafi just to become slaves to those who armed him and empowered him during all those years of authoritarian violence and repression.

What can be said while waiting for the bombs?

Because bombs will not differentiate between those who are pro-Qaddafi and who are against him.

Colonialist bombs, as you know, have only one objective: to defend the interests of arms traders. They sold Qaddafi arms worth billions and then we ask them to destroy them now... Then we will buy new arms through the new government - it is an old, well-known story. But there are people who cannot learn except through committing old mistakes, made long before.

Friday, March 18, 2011

i think it is the fact that it sounds like a child exploring a﻿ scale they've just discovered, a young, ignorant soul trying to rach and grasp the beauty that the world can create. wishing they were able to see and feel and taste and touch the world and all that's in it, yet mournful that all they have is a room and a piano. the moment before clarity, when beauty and sorrow, fear and sanctity all wrap into themselves

Phil Elvrum and Julie Doiron

Friday, March 11, 2011

Why are powerful drugs used to starch shirts, powder insoles, and make unique clothing? Because they are also excellent fine powders and durable textile fabrication materials. From Hamilton's Pharmacoepia at Vice.

Monday, February 14, 2011

“..ON MONDAY MORNING, WHEN THE DOORS OPEN, CLOSE THEM. DO NOT GO TO WORK. They cannot do anything to us that they haven’t already done at one time or another. Brothers, DON’T GIVE UP NOW. Make them come to the table. Be strong. DO NOT MAKE MONEY FOR THE STATE THAT THEY IN TURN USE TO KEEP US AS SLAVES….”This was the message sent out by one of the strike leaders on the fifth day of the largest prison strike in U.S. history. What started out on Dec. 9 as a coordinated strike in at least five of Georgia’s state prisons was originally intended to last only a day, but quickly evolved into a larger, longer struggle when prison officials locked down a number of the prisons. The strike was coordinated by a network of prisoners using cell phones that were smuggled into the prisons. If caught with a phone, a prisoner could face five more years in prison.